Liga I resumes with a cancelled match!

The excellent coach Petre Grigoras has every reason to feel frustrated, after more than two months of winter training

It’s been official for a couple of days now, but that doesn’t mean anything in Romania, as definitive sentences have been more than once revoked. It didn’t happen for Pandurii Targu Jiu, though, who failed refused to find an agreement with Dinamo over an unpaid debt and has not been scheduled for what was supposed to be the first official match of the year. A much anticipated one, considering that the visitors were the league leaders Otelul Galati, a team nobody wants to see in the same spot, at the end of the season.

Media attacks followed, with most of the other title contenders stating that this was a clever way to fix a match, especially after Pandurii’s boss revealed that the club refused to pay, being trapped between two decisions: the Football Professional League forces them to pay for a transfer that has been considered void in a civil court, while the authorities have warned the club that it’s illegal to pay for something that hasn’t been done by the law.

The fact is that Pandurii lost 0-3 tonight’s game with Otelul and there are big question marks about what’s going to happen, as this case might get very ugly and affect more than the current season. Pandurii’s next match is against Dinamo and Condescu says that paying that money now would only confirm that they had refused to play with Otelul and favor the leaders. But I doubt that they’ll be sticking with this decision and accept to go down without a fight. Let’s not forget that we’re talking about the club that should have gone down twice in recent years, but managed to find a way to keep their Liga I place even when they finished the season below the line…

Radu Baicu

• 15 years of continuous work in scouting, for top clubs and companies;
• Worked for clubs like Bayer 04 Leverkusen and Hannover 96, covering the Romanian market;
• Worked for Birmingham based company ‘The Scouting Network’ (www.tsn.co.uk) as a football scout;
• Worked for Zurich based company Boutique Football as a scouting network coordinator;
• International scout for Young Boys Bern for 2 years, covering Eastern European football.
• Working for the past 5 years as an international scout for a top French club.